7. Hepatitis A Incidence, 1980-2002

So, hepatitis A: hepatitis A is actually the
kind of thing we like to see - many people may not realize, but we
have had almost a stellar success. You get a vaccine out there and this disease
starts to go away. You may argue that we had all these cycles
up and it is just one of the downturns that naturally occur. But what has happened is that hepatitis A
has fallen below any of the historic lows that have occurred when it
was naturally circulating, and there have been studies done that show
that this is being driven by immunization. This yellow line up here that occurs on
several slides is the Healthy People 2010 target. We have actually
done better than the target. But even with rates of about 2 per 100,000
population, this still means that we are getting reported upwards of
10,000 cases. As I showed you earlier that still
represents almost 90,000 infected people, and one of the problems with
viral hepatitis is that many infections are asymptomatic, and zero is not always
zero. That is going to become a problem as we get
farther into control, but I think we can all deal with that, and again
that is part of figuring out how best to approach these
diseases.